Not acting is a kind of action, with its own consequences.Not choosing is itself a choice, a path followed that closes off other paths.Not risking has risks all of its own.It may look like disengagement from the world keeps you safe, but it's not so.Disengagement is its own kind of engagement.
Photography by Justin Wise
The story you tell about this time in your life isn't the only story. And the vantage point from which you're looking is not the only vantage point.Looking forwards, it might seem clear that you're on the way to a great success, or an inevitable defeat. Maybe it looks like life is all sorted: you've arrived and there is not much more for you to do. Or perhaps, from the depths of your confusion, it appears that you're lost and can never find your way back.Life is so much bigger than each of us, and so much more mysterious, that any story you have is at best partial. Looking back, what feels now like inevitable defeat may turn out to be a time of building strength: the strength you'll need to break out of the constraints that have been holding you back. What feels like being crushed by life could be the birth pangs of a new beginning. Maybe the solidity of your success so far turns out to be everything that will be taken from you.As Cheryl Strayed writes to her despairing younger self in Tiny Beautiful Things, it can turn out that "the useless days will add up to something", that "these things are your becoming."Everything changes. Nothing is ever just what it seems. And though you may feel sure you've understood your life, remember that it's very difficult to see which are the important parts, and quite why they're important, while you're still in them.
Photograph by Justin Wise
As we encounter each of life's difficulties, we get to choose:Consider ourselves cursed or mistreated, as if we are owed freedom from hurt, pain or confusion. As if life owes us happiness. As if we are meant to be in control of everything. This is, essentially, a fight against life as it is.Or draw on difficulty as part of life's path, an opportunity to turn more deeply into life rather than away from it.And while, with each successive difficulty or joy, we find that we understand life's movement less and less, perhaps this way we learn to live it more and more.
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[after Jules Renard - "As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to live it more and more"]
Frustration: a yearning for something that seems always just out of reach. It's one part desire, and another part despair.Intense, maddening, and in turns deflating, frustration brings the object of your desire to the centre of your attention. It shapes thoughts, tightens body. It has you thrash and complain. And it narrows your focus so that while it's in full swing, the rest of life is registered only dimly.Most surprising about frustration is its capacity to have you destroy the very thing you want so much:
The relationship in which you're longing for respect and trust, undone by your judgments, accusations and harsh words.
The project you want to bring to the world derailed by your insistence and unreasonableness.
The art you're creating undone by distraction and procrastination.
... which might not be as illogical as it sounds, at least at the moment of action, when destruction looks preferable to the despair of continual failure.But, like all moods, frustration is an angle on the world, not the world itself. It conceals much, even as it reveals powerfully what you care about.If you're able to tell that you're in it, you may be able to open yourself to the insight that it brings, and also to its narrowness. And from there, the possibility of seeing things from a wider perspective arises - the perspective that other moods such as gratitude, kindness, simple anger or hope could bring to the self-same situation.
It doesn't take much being still and quiet for the part of me that compares, judges and criticises to make itself known. Most often it's the tightness in my chest that I notice first, a clenched fist, a knot, a grasping and gasping for something to be done. Because this is the central judgement - that there is something I have neglected, some way in which I have not taken care, a sense in which I am never enough to have done what's called for. If I sit still for a little longer, a stream of judgements come into view. I've made poor decisions - look at the outcome of that! I've not been attentive enough, successful enough, thoughtful enough. I don't know what I'm doing. I am lost in the world, because of all the ways I fall short, and I'm not doing enough to address it. Even my sitting here quietly for a few minutes is proof of my inadequacy. 'Why am I not moving?' it screams, 'Why am I not doing something?'In the face of this it's no wonder busyness has such an appeal. When I'm busy I can mostly ignore the tugging wrench of the critic, and in some small way it is appeased, quitening a little, even if what I am doing is inconsequential, busy-work. But when I am busying myself in this distracted way I miss the possibility of contact with a much deeper, more spacious aspect of myself - an aspect which I might even call 'Self'. Self is prepared to look where the critic is not looking. Self sees with wonder this miraculous body that breathes and moves and loves and creates. It's prepared to look with gratitude at the turns of fortune, too many to count, that lead me to be alive, in this time, on this planet. It's willing to hold all of me - be all of me - with such gentleness and kindness, holding even the critic in its arms. And it's committed to a much more truthful accounting of my life, celebrating my many successes and contributions, and knowing that there is still much to be done. It also knows, in a way the critic is never prepared to acknowledge, how much capacity and skill I possess, as well as how much support from life and from the many people who love me. Where 'critic' would propel me into the world in a frantic cycle of shame-fuelled activity, 'Self' knows me as an expression of life itself and would have me live in that way. And while critic does its best to make slowing feel enormously difficult, it's in the centre of the quietest stillness that Self is most willing to come forward and make itself known. Credit: Mal Booth via Compfight cc
It is, it seems, an unavoidable part of the human condition to have a super-ego or inner critic, a part of you that is directed towards keeping you within certain bounds of appropriateness at all times.Long ago, when you were very small, you needed the adults around you to do this for you but now you've internalised those voices, or at least a distorted version of them, and they're quite able to keep you in line even when there's nobody else around.And now, that harsh inner voice, the voice that can wound you at the slightest opportunity, is vigilantly on the look-out for the signs of disapproval from others that it takes as evidence of your shortcomings. Before you've even thought about it, it has inserted its judgements into your stream of thoughts, scolding you, judging others. That raised eyebrow? It's because you irritate her, obviously. That offhand comment? You're clearly an idiot. When she didn't congratulate you on your work? Because you're not up to much. He didn't return your call? Because you've let him down.None of these, I hope you can see, are necessarily the case.The inner critic can turn even the most innocuous of comments into a perceived attack, and amplify a genuine attack so that it's much more wounding than the attacker intended. And then, you'll collapse and deflate, or rise in rage and indignation, and the strength of your reaction will surprise both you and your interlocutor.And, in many cases, you'll be reacting not to them at all but to this phenomenon that's going on inside you.Being under attack from others is made so much more difficult by the relentless attack you're under from yourself.
Photograph by Justin Wise
It's when we actually listen to another human being that they get to be human too. Listening allows a shift from I-It relating in which the other is essentially an object to us (an irritation, a way to get what I want, a way to feel good about myself) to I-You relating, in which the other gets to be a person.As Martin Buber points out, I-It relating is essentially a form of It-It relating, since it's impossible for us to show up as full human beings, even to ourselves, when we are in the midst of making another, or a group of others, into a thing. To relate to another in an I-You way, to listen to them in their fullness, bestows dignity on everyone and opens wide horizons for understanding, compassion, truthfulness, and relationship.Listening ought to be the easiest thing to do. After all, it requires no complex framework, no technique, no technology. And yet it can be so, so hard.Most of us have a lot of practicing to do in order to drop our need to be right, to be ‘the one’, to be liked, and to hear only what we want to hear. In order to listen we have to relax our defensiveness, be skilful with the inner attacks of our own inner critic (which is ready to judge us even when there's no judgement coming from the speaker), get over our wish to control everything, and be willing to welcome whatever we experience. We have to be able to question our own stories and accounts, be open to seeing things in a whole new way, and quiet our inner world sufficiently that what is being said can reach us. And we have to learn how to be in contact with ourselves, a fundamental prerequisite for being in contact with others.Perhaps all of this is why real listening is so absent in our fearful, impatient culture. And why we could all benefit from doing some inner work if we want to do the vital outer work of listening well to the people around us.
Photography by Justin Wise
Our capacity to imagine allows us to convince ourselves that we know other people - their intentions, their wishes, their inner worlds - when we hardly know them at all. But what we are sure we know can so easily turn out to be simply what we've invented. And once we're sure, we quickly discount evidence to the contrary, reinforcing what we've imagined by the selective way in which we look and listen.We can imagine grudges and resentments, frustrations and slights, judgements and failings, hurts and distances, all without even once checking that they are true. And we can go for years, thinking we know others, when what we know is our story about them.We do this with lovers and enemies, children and parents, siblings and friends, colleagues and acquaintances. We do this with people whose culture is different from our own, people who live or speak differently from us, people who vote differently.And all of it feels so real.There is one simple, and difficult, and necessary way to address the suffering, distance and estrangement that comes from our imaginings, and that is to listen.Simple, because all of us are able to ask another 'please, tell me about yourself, tell me what I need to know in order to understand you more fully'. We can do this with loved ones, with work colleagues, and across seemingly unresolvable divides. And we can start today, even if we have never had such a conversation before. All it takes is a willingness to be present and to hear, fully, what the other has to say.Difficult, because listening in this way means we have to drop our defensiveness, our wish to hear things only on our terms, our fear that we won't like what is said. We have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, available, open. This is not the same as giving up our own way of seeing the world or simply doing what another person asks, but it does require allowing ourselves to be changed by the encounter. And this calls on us to summon up reserves of courage and grace and compassion, and to give up being in control all the time.And necessary because our imaginings so easily act as a wedge between us, prolonging our difficulties, denying us the creative and nourishing possibilities of relationship, and blinding us to suffering as well as to the light and goodness that is in us and all around us if we'll only look.
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It’s tempting to think the change you’re longing for will come about through a single revolutionary step.… somebody (usually not you) realising the error of their ways… a new vision or mission statement for your company… a new to-do list that will solve all problems, ease all illsThis is the kind of magical thinking that leads to the often-practiced and rarely effective tradition of team ‘away days’. Yes, a day of talking can take you a long way. And yes, a list of freshly-minted things-to-do can give you all a feeling of relief, perhaps even hope, for a few minutes at least.But it should be no surprise that on return to the everyday world of your office or workplace, nothing seems to change as quickly or as radically as you had hoped.From the ashes of magical thinking cynicism is easily born.You might more helpfully think of most change – particularly change in relationships, trust or understanding – as a kind of titration. Drip followed by drip followed by drip.Radical overnight revolutionary change of the kind that you’re hoping for, or promising, is the work of messiahs and magicians (and, sometimes, charlatans).For the rest of us, the dedicated, consistent, purposeful, patient work of repeated speaking and listening, promising and requesting, messing up and correcting, talking and learning, practicing and practicing.Small steps, now.Small steps.
What if the way your life is, and the way you are now, are not how things turned out, but training in the preliminaries? Or, said another way, if your life so far was but the education and practice you needed in order to be able to take the very next step?Thought about like this, your life is now is not some curse, the punishment for some crime, or a consequence of your many failings and transgressions. No, it's been fertile soil which has nourished just the qualities and skills you need to take the step that only you now can take.And given the extraordinary unlikelihood of you being here in the first place - the very fact of your life has the odds stacked billions to one against...... and given that it will be gone in a blink of an eye, even if you live to a ripe age, and given that nobody but you could have lived the exact life you've lived so far... given all of this, the step that only you can take, the step for which your whole life until this moment has been a preparation, that single step is given to you now - however ordinary, however modest - as a gift yours for the taking, if you will but take it.
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